


All the Ways We Never Were (and one time we were)

by Infinitely_Stranger



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: 5+1 Things, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Heavy Angst, I swear it's a happy ending though, I'm Sorry, M/M, Post-Season/Series 04, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, and one time it wasn't, basically 5 ways it could have been horrible
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-24
Updated: 2017-02-24
Packaged: 2018-09-26 13:55:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9901424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Infinitely_Stranger/pseuds/Infinitely_Stranger
Summary: 'Your own death is something that happens to everyone else. Your life is not your own, keep your hands off it.’-Sherlock,The Lying Detective...5+1 of all the ways things could have worked out much worse, and a bit of an ode to Sherlock's bit on taking one's life from the last season.  As such, there is a lot of self-inflicted death, though nothing graphic.To frame it in a gentler way, you could imagine it as though John has had five nightmares, wakes up, and describes them to Sherlock. Narration flips between John, and 3rd person semi-omniscient, with one italicised snippet from Sherlock.





	1. Chapter 1

I

 

The first time, I don’t even make it home.

...

An army doctor bleeds out in the desert. Two weeks later, an alcoholic sister drowns herself in one last bottle. When they find her, the engraving of her phone is imprinted into her face, where she passed out on it, a morbid epitaph to her failed marriage.

Six months later, some unemployed posh boy with your typical history of public schooling and intermittent drugs problem commits suicide in an old school. He is, oddly, smiling, in dreadful contrast to his empty two-tone eyes, which are almost as clear as the tiny bottle in his hand. The scenes-of-crime officer tries to convince herself that it’s rigor-mortis taking hold in the small muscles of his face, but it still makes her feel a bit sick inside.

Five hours and twenty-three minutes later, a banking intern thanks his lucky stars that his cabbie had already pulled over to let him out when the aneurism hit, pound coins dropping heavy from his chapped fingers before they can be counted.

Across the city, NSY begins to breathe a collective sigh of relief as, in the weeks that follow, the suicides some nut jobs tried to brand as murders finally end.

 _‘I told you boss, one day showing up won’t be enough. One day we’ll be standing round a body, and Sherlock Holmes will be the one that put it there._ ’

 In the DI’s office, after hours, a greying divorcee suspects, but will never know.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

II

The second time, I don’t make it to Barts.

I don’t even make it out of my bedsit.

...

An army doctor shuffles defective feet on the sticky acrylic flooring. The blinds stay drawn, blocking out a grey view onto the musty corrugated roof and oxidised pipes of the ventilation shaft. The dawn of one more bad day in a series of bad days filters into endless taupe. It’s like that song, the one that was on repeat for three-quarters’ hour last Saturday, coming in from god knows where through the paper-thin walls: _no alarms, no surprises_ , just the numb slip from nauseating sleepless nights into meaningless days, stretching into eternity.

 ...

The next day, a lecturer enjoys an uninterrupted lunch in Russell Square Gardens before heading back to his medical students.

A young man opens a drawer, and is reprimanded, ‘no, not that one’, by a cringing mortuary technician, whose thoughts of attempting lipstick are destroyed by the bright red of the body’s mangled skull. Slender fingers shut the drawer with the same flick you might use to direct a violin bow.

‘Afghanistan, or Iraq?’

‘I… I’m sorry?’

‘That man. Well, it would have been _his_ military grade pistol that he did himself in with, judging by the haircut, or what’s left of it, and the tan, not above the sleeves, so unlikely he’d been on holiday. You can’t get a tan like that in Britain this time of year, and that bullet wound on his shoulder can’t have been healed more than six months. So, which sunny climate would see you invalided out of the military in the last six months? It would have to be either Afghanistan, or Iraq.’

‘I… I don’t know. I didn’t know him.’ The morgue assistant looks like she might be ill. ‘It’ll be this one here,’ she almost whispers, pulling out the correct drawer.

‘Splendid!’ breathes the man, and the woman edges away, wondering if she should still give the lipstick a go, wishing he would look at her with half feeling he directs to the prospect of…whatever experiment he was here to do, wishing she wasn’t thinking any of these things at all.

Across town, a dying cabbie comes across a very peculiar blog entry on the distinguishing traits of tobacco ash, and wonders if life might give him something a bit interesting, before he goes. Someone to entertain him for more than a few minutes. It will, but he’ll still be ultimately disappointed by the man’s choice.

 ...

Inside a bedsit in Marylebone, a hand that used to save lives fingers smooth steel for the last time. In the final moments, he is surprised to find his hand doesn’t shake at all.


	3. Chapter 3

III

 

The third time, a young man doesn’t miscalculate.

He is tired of the world, tired of being bored, tired of the expectation that he’ll fit himself into some role, any role, that is too dull, and that he doesn’t understand. He has memorised all the patterns of appropriate social reactions, but it’s such a tedious way to go about living when you can’t actually see the point in it all. It’s like endlessly attending a church service for a religion you don’t believe in. He tries to remember a time when his unaffected personality didn’t breed discomfort in all those who surrounded him, and he can’t, and he should know, he has an excellent memory. But there’s no point to it, is there? No use in it. The world’s all dreadfully boring, and it doesn’t matter what he tries to put his mind to, none if it counts for anything, there’s no point in any of it.

So he doesn’t miscalculate.

Seventeen hours later, his brother manages to track him down, but it’s too late. Of course it is.

…

Six years, five months, and twenty-six days later, a former army doctor goes back to his bedsit for the last time. Ever since running into an old colleague from his medical degree, he’s felt increasingly overwhelmed by a sense of futility. The man had suggested he get a flatmate – a flatmate! As if anyone would want to live with with a madman with an illegal firearm who wakes up screaming every night or so. Mike had laughed, and shook his head, ‘Always had a sense of humour, Watson,’ and the conversation had dwindled on. Regardless of what his therapist says, the bare fact of the matter is that there is no job he can imagine doing anymore that actually appeals to him, not now that the nerve damage has devastated his skills as a surgeon. It’s GP or teach, and he knows both would drive him out of his mind. There’s no urgency there, no variety, nothing unexpected. Hell, much as he’s trying to get over the war, sometimes he thinks that Ella has it all wrong, that he misses it, even if the thought of it starts a drip of panic down his spine. In some ways, isn’t fear of a real threat better than certainty that nothing interesting will ever happen to you again? Over there, he had a purpose, a vitality, an awareness of the life that was pounding through his veins at every moment, precisely because the next moment wasn’t ever a sure thing. Now he can’t even afford to live in London anymore, and the city’s the only vaguely living thing left in his world.

No, seeing Mike was the last straw. He’s helping no one in the world, and holding out for nothing.

…

Three years later, a young forensic technician smiles to herself as she leaves work, having just been promoted to senior lab supervisor. It’s not a cheery business, working in a morgue, but not everyone can do what Molly Hooper does. It used to bother her that she didn’t have a boyfriend or anyone to come home to, but lately the last three years have felt like a blessing. It’s nice not to have that horrid anxiety of knowing the person you fancy doesn’t give a toss about you, which is what always seemed to happen to her back when she was in uni and bothered trying to date. None of that now though, now she’s the youngest lab supervisor they’ve ever had, and she feels like she could take on the world.

On a whim, she texts the DI, the one who’s always in there for the more complicated cases. _Just got promoted, fancy a pint?_ You never know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... I've been a bit mean in this one, but let's be honest, meeting Sherlock hasn't done poor Molly any favours on the general happiness front.


	4. Chapter 4

IV

 

The next time, I make it to you.

 ...

There are so many ways we could die, with the life we lead. You’re so reckless with that magnificent machine of your body, and so am I with… the battered second-hand car that is mine, or at least, I used to be. Now someone has to be around to look after you, because you sure as hell aren’t about to look after yourself. Or at least I tell myself that, again, and again. Almost believe it too. The both of us do.

Surprisingly, it’s not the lifestyle that does us in. What’s that you used to say? Oh, yeah, the universe would hardly be so careless.

No…it’s… it’s me again. Well, it’s you, and then it’s me, and then it’s you.

It’s you on a roof, saying ‘ _Goodbye, John_ ’, and then it’s me, and all the myriad ways to end myself in your flat. My flat. Our flat. My flat now that you’re gone, and my grief, but your ghost, providing all the ways for me to take care of that. In this version, no matter how much I believe in you, I don’t believe enough to take away the last things I said to your living, breathing face. I believe in you, but I don’t believe you’re coming back, and part of me believes that I killed you. I was the person you were closest to in all the world, they tell me, so who could have saved you if not me?

I try for a while. I know what to say to victims of suicide and grief, what you are supposed to say. It’s not the fault of the survivors if you can’t save your loved one. You were a planner, after all. After a sort. All the possibilities of every situation appeared to you in a split second, so surely, you must have thought this out too. Surely a few angry words from your friend couldn’t have made the difference, not when there had been so many. Or a few kind ones.

The trying works at first, until the morphine of denial wears off. Then the doubt grows deeper and deeper, a darkness slipping in from the edges of my consciousness until it is everywhere. It was my fault, I should have saved you.

Still, I keep at this ‘trying’ business. I get myself a girlfriend. She’s a nurse. She’s colourful. Not luminous like you, but she’s got something… something that reminds me of you. Just a little. An edge. But I can’t put my finger on it, which is the only reason I can attempt, a little, with her. Mary, that’s her name. Most of the time she’s nothing like you at all.

It doesn’t help though, not really. I wake up with nightmares, constantly, worse than they ever were before. I don’t know if she doesn’t hear, or if she only pretends she doesn’t hear. I don’t know if I wake up screaming your name, or if it’s only in my head, as I watch you fall again, and again, and again.

If she’s pretending, I don’t blame her. I wouldn’t want to confront it either.

I think about marriage. It seems like the right thing, a show that I’m heading in the right direction, heading away from the detour that was eighteen months of you, and before that, years of military.   Heading back to whatever kinds of dreams I could still have in whatever remains of the world I used to know.

I buy a ring. I take it out some evenings, and measure its cold density in my palm, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Not yet. I still feel like I’m waiting for something, and that the waiting is the only thing really keeping me together. Each time I consider the ring, it’s only a matter of time before I have to confront what it is that I’ve been waiting for, and realise that it’s something that will never happen. _One more miracle, for me_. The problem is, I trust you with your death as much as I trusted you with my life. It crushes me every time, with a crippling physical pain that shouldn’t be possible. And I should know, I’ve been shot. You are gone. I know this, but some part of me can never know it. My eyes have always been a cracked sort of dark blue, I know this too, but when I look in the mirror, all I see is the endless grey behind you on the day you fell.

It gets harder and harder to fight the pain, so one day, I stop fighting.

 ...

One day later, somewhere in Serbia, a tortured shell of a man is rescued from captivity by the British Government. He doesn’t even make it out of the country before he deduces in his brother’s face the one thing said brother knew he couldn’t afford to know. The man's second fall, from the airlift, is one you don’t come back from, and the sky above him is a cracked sort of dark blue. In his last moments, he allows himself to imagine it means something.


	5. Chapter 5

V

 

The last time it isn’t my story to tell.

...

  _There are so many ways I could have gone. It could have been your assassin wife, with better aim, just a few centimetres over. She was a bit out of practice, after all. You would have never known then, perhaps, about her. You would have mourned me, and lived your life out with her, with your daughter, mourning together. Or perhaps you wouldn’t have, if Mary didn’t then get to Magnussen in time. But it doesn’t matter, because I don’t go that way._

_The last time, it isn’t the assassin wife, or the blackmailing mogul, or another sentence in Eastern Europe, or even the shade of Moriarty._

_In the end, you won’t know when it happens. You will be in your flat, in the suburbs, with Mary and Rosie, or on your way to work, or at the shops. The point is, it won’t matter where you are, because you won’t even be thinking. You certainly won’t be thinking about me, and that’s fine. In the end, it’s all fine._  

...

_Somewhere in the outskirts of London, a GP and his wife enjoy their family, and the outside viewer will see nothing more than that._

_In a flat in central London, a man with a brain burning with light will fill the void in his veins one last time. He has fulfilled his vows as far as he can, though it isn’t as far as he thought, and he leaves them, because now that he has learned how, he cannot bear to be left behind, to slip away into the periphery and grow unimportant. There is a place for him in their lives, but it isn’t a big enough place to fill the empty feeling that issues forth upon every beat of the heart that he’s learnt (too late) to have. The emptiness fills him, and fills the disused spaces of his flat. It is there in the knowledge that it will never be anything other than_ his _flat again, never theirs, never ours, never home. It is fine, it is natural, it is the way the world works, and he’s always known it. Fortune may favour the brave, but traditional patterns of human pair-bonding do not favour self-proclaimed sociopaths. Yet hope has proven insidious in recent years. It found its way into even him, and now its breaches have formed fissures, and they are destroying him._

_As everything fades away, he can almost feel a forgiving lap cushioning his head, a soft stomach against his ear, a treasured heartbeat that he’s never been granted the grace to hear, familiar hands in his hair, and the warmth that was home. It is almost the way he’d want to go._

 ...

It will bother me to the end of my days that I cannot know the moment you left this world.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (In case it wasn't clear, the italics are Sherlock, the non-italicised portion is John)


	6. Chapter 6

VI

 

But it doesn’t go like this.

It is much stranger than that, and much more painful than that, but it is a living, carrying pain, and in the end we make it through. Neither of us cares for death as much as we could, we’ve seen too much of it to have faith that cutting one thread will make things any easier. It’s like you said one evening, in lieu of an apology, and in lieu of the gratitude we both feel but struggle to articulate. _‘Taking your own life. Interesting expression, taking it from who? Once it's over, it's not you who'll miss it. Your own death is something that happens to everyone else. Your life is not your own, keep your hands off it.’_

You told me you said this to her, your sister, when you didn’t know her, but the words weren’t ever for her, not really. Your finger ran along the line of the Sig, as you spoke to me, because it had been me you thought of – me, in that bedsit, before I knew you, and all the other times when the process of living and breathing was almost too much to endure, but just barely wasn’t. And that’s been the way of it, hasn’t it. The things you say, the things you do. Ever since we met, you’re hardly speaking if it’s not to me. And I…I know you’ll laugh if I say I’ve been thinking, but I’ll say it anyway, now that I finally can – I’ve hardly a thought that isn’t for you

In the end we remain, and remain, and remain. And now central London will find you with a forgiving lap in which to rest your head, a familiar pulse against your ear, and a hand in your hair to mollify whatever alternative beginnings and endings and in-betweens might drop in to give pause to your brilliant brain. And we will have that for many years, because the universe may be many things, but it is neither lazy nor cruel as a rule. As far as I can tell, there are no rules as such, just random collisions. So, much as the other random collisions that _could_ have occurred keep us up at night from time to time, we’ve found ourselves in one of the luckier ones. It’s one that allows us to ride out the nightmares on the tide of each other’s heartbeats, and one that’ll let us keep colliding until you’re as wrinkled as the washing you never do, and I’m greyer than the washing I do, and Rosie’s coming back for visits to tease us both about how ancient and out-of-touch we’ve become in our world. We make it through in perhaps neither the most artful nor dramatic of conclusions, stumbling towards each other, stumbling through our own admissions, at last, but we do make it there in the end.

In the end, it’s just you and me, and the world - our world - and that’s more than fine.


End file.
